2025: The Year We Pretended We Were Fine

If you’re reading this, honestly, congrats. You survived another year in what feels like an apocalypse. The world keeps shape-shifting around us, and somehow you still feed yourself (even if semi-regularly), answer some percent of your texts, and occasionally remember where your keys were and who you are. That counts as a win.

Every December, people start acting like the whole year was some inspirational montage with soft girl lighting and whimsical music. Meanwhile, most of us were just doing our best to stay upright.

This post is not a curated highlight reel of triumphs. It’s more of a letter honoring the people who made it through the year by sheer emotional stamina, caffeine, a healthy dose of spite and defiance, and maybe one or two stable relationships if they were lucky.

You know who you are.

You kept going even when everything felt like too much. You showed up to therapy in sweatpants with the energy of a Victorian ghost holding a lantern. You navigated trauma flashbacks, shame spirals, heartbreak, and the kind of stress that makes you question what a normal even is anymore. You built new relationships. You accidentally fucked up some old ones. You tried again. You did your best.

You survived moments that would knock most people flat. And you did it while answering Slack messages and remembering an affirmations list your corny therapist (…hi!) gave you that you don’t even like that much.

Here’s the part people tend to forget. Healing in a year like this is not cinematic. There’s no dramatic soundtrack, no 60 second glow-ups. It’s gritty and repetitive and dull.

It was waking up and brushing your teeth even though your brain is being a sassy bitch.

It was choosing not to call your ex even though the loneliness feels like it could swallow you whole from the inside out.

It was crashing out in your car during lunch and then still going back inside to work.

It was being honest with yourself for a whole five minutes before going back to delulu as the solulu.

Those tiny acts add up. They are the real story of this year, even if nobody posts them. You are the real story of this year.

The world did not make things easy on you this year. Burnout, disasters, and humanitarian crises became the background noise of daily life. Capitalism kept up its long-running jump scare. Some of us coped by overachieving. Some of us coped by eating cereal at midnight and calling the Everest of laundry piles “decor.” Some of us did both. Whatever you did to stay alive this year was valid.

It’s okay if 2025 felt more like putting out fires than building something new. You did not need to butterfly transform into a “healed” version of yourself. And you definitely don’t need to end this month with a Pinterest-perfect resolutions board drenched in gold stickers and holiday vibes.

From one messy AF human to another, please know that just making it through this year was an achievement in and of itself.

If you felt lost or numb or overwhelmed or burned the fuck out, that was your nervous system responding to reality. If you kept trying, even on the days you had nothing left, that was you healing. If you only had ten percent to give and you that’s what you gave, you gave everything you could.

2026 does not need to be your phoenix rebirth. It can simply be your next step.

So to the haunted, the hopeful, the burned out, the brave, to the wonderfully weird humans who refused to give up on themselves this year: here is my slightly cringey but very heartfelt standing ovation.

You did enough this year.

And you get another try tomorrow.